Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

This is a recommend from Jessica, who in turn read it on the recommendation of Bishop Connett, who recommended it to her because she had read and loved The Book Thief, which I'm pretty sure I recommended to Jessica. That's a full circle of recommendations.

I got it because I ran out of reading material five days before I left the UK. That was an unexpected development. I brought three books with me, and had only barely started one of them before I left, and I thought three books was plenty for three weeks. But we had a lot of reading time in those three weeks, and by our last Sunday I was done. Thus began a surprisingly difficult search for a bookstore, something that seemed like it should have been easier given that we were visiting Stratford-upon-Avon (the birthplace of William Shakespeare), and Oxford (one of the great academic centers of the world).

We did finally locate a bookstore in Oxford, and I bought my British edition of Suite Francaise, and it lasted me to my layover in Philadelphia a few days later, where I was once again left bookless with the prospect of a four-hour layover and two more hours on a plane. (Enter Book #5.)

Irene Nemirovsky intended this work to be much longer, a cycle of five novels, but she died in Auschwitz after completing only two. It is these two novels that make up Suite Francaise. The first recounts the experiences of a handful of people during the German invasion of France, and the second takes place in a small town during the occupation.

One of the things that was difficult for me in reading the book was that, particularly in the first part, Nemirovsky takes a rather cynical view of human nature. Many of the characters are selfish, and not particularly likeable, written in such a way that it was hard to relate to them. The story was about people and their experiences, but I found it difficult to place myself in the circumstances, that the novel was more a commentary on society, and a rather scathing one.

Still, I did enjoy reading the book. What I found most fascinating about it was the fact that Nemirovsky had written the novel almost simultaneous to the events that were taking place. And while she intended the work to be a cycle of five novels, the events that would have shaped the remaining three had not yet occurred. She herself did not know where the story would end, and she was living out the story as it happened. I have never read anything like that. And for all the books and movies and documentaries and history lessons on World War II that I have been exposed to, I know very, very little about the role of France and the French people. This book gave me insight into the experiences of these people, and into a society that I ought to know more about than I do. It was a good book, and a good recommendation.